In late December 2025, former President Donald Trump posted a photo on Truth Social claiming that windmills were killing the United States’ most iconic bird, the bald eagle. The post was amplified by a White House account on X, intensifying scrutiny of the claim and the image.
The image depicted a dead falcon at a wind farm in Israel, photographed years earlier. The Guardian’s reporting, corroborated by Haaretz, traced the image to an Israeli wind farm and identified the photographer as Hedy Ben Eliahou. The Guardian article also notes that while wind turbines do cause bird deaths in Israel, the scale implied by equating the photo to a US bald eagle was unfounded.
Haaretz reported in 2017 that wind turbines in Israel kill birds and bats at higher-than-expected rates, but the photographic attribution and the geographic leap into US iconography turned the image into a political tool. This episode demonstrates how renewable-energy discussions can be shaped by misleading imagery that crosses borders.
First, imagery can be repurposed to stoke outrage about policy without accurate geography or species; second, official accounts or their amplifiers can legitimize miscaptioned material, complicating the fact-checking process. The broader conversation around wind energy remains nuanced, acknowledging wildlife impacts while avoiding extrapolation from a single miscaptioned image.